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It’s Queen Elizabeth II’s defining paradox that she is one of the world’s most public figures, and one of the most unknown – ‘a postage stamp with a pulse’. No one knows, for example, what takes place during her confidential weekly meetings with her prime ministers, even though they pivot on the historical understanding that, no matter what, the prime minister will always have her support.

Peter Morgan, who has already probed the relationship between politics and the monarchy in The Queen (and is reunited once again with Helen Mirren here), imagines eight of those relationships, in what partly resembles a piece of fantasy playwriting. Did the Queen really detest Margaret Thatcher, as the reported fallout over Maggie’s refusal to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa would suggest? Was pipe-parading Wilson, with his salt-of-the-earth Huddersfield charm, really her favourite? Is Her Majesty, in other words, actually a bit of a liberal softy?

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Morgan is pretty adapt in the language of power and attuned to its nature as a construct, so it’s little surprise that much of Stephen Daldry’s slick production turns on the gap between the Queen’s private and public selves, and the extraordinary existential prison of the modern British monarchy, in which she is compelled to always perform but rarely simply be.

Mirren, in a series of spot-on period transformations, cleverly enforces Morgan’s most interesting point: that the monarchy is not so much an imperial institution as one dependent on the will of the people. ‘Make up your minds what you want us to be,’ an anguished monarch tells John Major when, during the Princess Diana divorce shenanigans, he suggests the Royals should decommission Britannia in order to regain a bit of popularity.

Mirren’s Queen has an unexpected fascination with the mental health of her ministers (as though Morgan really wants to say: ‘It’s not just prime ministers who suffer from acute depression’), a waspish humour, an umbilical sense of duty and a shrewd grasp of political affairs. In contrast, her prime ministers feel more like a succession of caricatures – albeit often very funny ones: Paul Ritter’s beleaguered John Major is in a constant state of despair, Rufus Wright’s David Cameron, who you’d think would have quite a lot to discuss, just wants to talk about Kate’s latest scan.

This is a play concerned with the emotional loneliness of politics rather than the more dramatic cut and thrust. Yet it’s also a humane portrait of a woman who understands fully the absurdity of her predicament, as head of a symbolically powerful institution that has very little real power at all.